With the Modern Libraries in SharePoint Online, getting a direct link – with a readable path – is not as straight forward as it was with the Classic Libraries. While the option is not there right before you, it is still possible to obtain such a link. In fact, there are even two.

In some scenarios it is required to put a site in read only-mode, for example a project site, or to simply just remove access to it.

From the SharePoint Online Admin Center there is no way to lock your site, or to put it in read-only. There are two ways to achieve this, one is through Powershell, the other one through the Site Settings of your Site Collection.

A customer of mine had the need to get an overview of all the checked out documents for a given Site Collection, and to check them in afterwards prior to a content migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online.

Since no out of the box features exist to accomplish this goal, I had to write a Powershell-script to find all the checked out documents in a Site Collection.

You can find the script here. It works for SharePoint Online as for SharePoint 2013. I did not test it with SharePoint 2010.

While Microsoft has been promoting the usage of metadata and views above folders in SharePoint document libraries, Microsoft Teams lacks these possibilities. It gives you a full list of documents in that document library, but with no metadata, no views and no filtering.

As technology is evolving into a more and more client-side experience, JavaScript is becoming a substantial part in SharePoint implementations. With JavaScript you can build rich, fast, interactive user experiences on the client with responsive interfaces that run in browsers as well as a hybrid, native HTML experience on phones.

SharePoint fully embraces this trend, and has released the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). A Page and Part model that enables fully supported client-side development, easy integration with the Microsoft Graph and support for open source tooling. The new experiences for the new mobile app, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, including the new document library and list experiences are built using the SharePoint Framework.

What is metadata?

Metadata is data about your data, which makes working with and tracking of data easier. For example, on an invoice you could add metadata to define the customer, due date and the total invoice amount. This would make it easy to quickly find specific invoices, the data. In a SharePoint environment, such metadata fields are called columns. They are used to create specific views in your libraries or to use in the search engine.

SharePoint comes with a strong tool to centrally manage metadata, managed metadata. It will offer some great practical uses for your business. Consistent use of metadata, improved content discoverability, increased flexibility and the possibility to easily translate, add synonyms to, reuse and pin keywords are just a few of the many benefits of managed metadata.